Executives involved in the case get fines and prison terms of up to nine months

The LCD industry was rocked by a scandal in late 2008 when executives from some of the largest panel makers in the world pled guilty to conspiring to fix prices. The price fixing led to inflated costs for displays used by firms like Dell in its notebook computers.

In November of 2008, executives from Sharp, LG, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes all pled guilty to price fixing. The largest fine imposed was placed on LG and totaled $400 million with Sharp said to be paying $85 million in fines.

Today reports are coming in that in addition to the fines levied against the corporations; the executives that participated in the scheme are being individually fined and sentenced to prison time here in America.

DigitalTrends reports that the former Chairman and CEO of Chunghwa, Chieng-Hon Lin was hit with an individual fine of $50,000 and a sentence of 9-months in an American prison. The other executives involved in the scandal received prison terms ranging from six to nine months each.

Deborah A. Garza, Acting Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, said in a statement, "These cases involve the first Taiwanese nationals to face imprisonment in the United States for an antitrust offense. The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable all conspirators who harm American consumers, no matter where they live or where they commit the crime."

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Seeing as how Oil companies have a roughly 8% profit margin, and Oil Speculators have been losing their tails while prices dropped 70%, I'm not sure what your referring to. Maybe you can enlighten us?

Don't forget to address the point that when gasoline was $1/gallon, oil companies were losing money and some were even going out of business. If you want to talk about real greed - then refer to your local, state, and federal politicians who want to raise taxes on commodities after we start conserving. While we decrease our standard of living - they feel they can keep theirs the same if not increase.

"Some" of the oil speculators lost their tails towards the end. At the time of $4 barrel it did not cost the Oil companies any more or any less to produce. So where did the money go? The gas stations didn't get it, your telling me the Oil companies didn't get it, and I don't buy the story that the Saudi's got all of it. So where did the money go?

Start digging a little deeper and you will see the manipulation going on. Some say the meteoric drop in oil price was done to cripple and reign in Russia and Iran. Who knows? Gasoline going from $4/gal to $1.50/gal solely based on supply and demand is pure bullsch1dt.

BTW- I don't have a problem stringing up our local, state, and federal politicians either. On that, we are in violent agreement.

quote: Gasoline going from $4/gal to $1.50/gal solely based on supply and demand is pure bullsch1dt.

Actually - its quite the opposite. Going from $1.50/gal to $4.00/gal was pure "bullsch1dt". It was all speculation from wars in the middle east, tension with Iran, offline refineries, etc. Whats happening now is the market is readjusting to where it should be based on supply and demand - or haven't you noticed that rounds of OPEC supply cuts haven't worked?

quote: At the time of $4 barrel it did not cost the Oil companies any more or any less to produce.

No one claimed it did. They production costs remain roughly stationary, and so does their profit margin of 8%. On $1.00/gal they make $.08, but on $4.00/gal, they make $.32. Good reason for their profits quadrupling.

quote: So where did the money go?

They money went to the oil producing nations. Haven't you noticed that Iran and Venezuela are in big trouble because their entire budgets are based on $80+ per barrel oil?

You can't deny, though, that global demand has been reduced in the past six months, as well. I'm not saying there wasn't speculation, but there's a good reason for prices to drop. And remember that the relation between supply/demand and price isn't linear. If demand only slightly exceeds supply, people will pay whatever it takes to get the gas they need. Who here reduced their gas use when it was $3.00? I didn't. That's part of why it went to $4.00. The price will continue to rise until demand equals supply - and China's demand, among others, has (or had) been steadily increasing for the past decade.

Not all of it. And please don't blame it on off-line refineries. That gig is so lame. Every time a refinery goes off line it's usually due to scheduled preventative maintenance. In other words it's a planned outage. Occasionally it's storm related. And since there was no spike in gas consumption at that time the refinery argument is just fluff.

The drop in oil is the "news" here. It was merely the larger speculators (ponzi artists) dumping their paper barrels on the market and cashing in.

quote: Whats happening now is the market is readjusting to where it should be based on supply and demand

No it's not. The huge drop was due to an artificial supply problem brought on by the speculators. We've cut our gasoline consumption by what, 5%. So oil drops from $150/bbl to $32/bbl or roughly 80% based on normal supply and demand. I don't think so.

Not sure what the U.S was like, but here every time there was a "Petrol Issue" Prices would increase INSTANTLY, however when the reversed happened... They took there time to lower the prices, Now the price of petrol is sitting at a comfortable $1.09 per Litre, or $4.10 per Gallon here in Australia.(Better than the $1.80 per litre I saw at one stage, which ends up as $6.86 per gallon).However that is in a rural part of Australia where the costs were higher than the city areas.

Like house prices, the rise in oil prices had a route in the old adage of:

"something is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it" or more accurately "something is worth whatever people think that they can afford to pay for it".

For a while these high prices were sustained by the personal credit bubble, but seeing as that has well and truly burst, people realised that they could not buy the amount/level of Gas/Petrol and Housing that they were before and the prices have had to drop.

There's an element of supply and demand there but in this crazy topsy-turvy world of the last 10 years or so the supply and demand was on both sides of the equation.

That is the supply and demand of/for the goods and the supply and demand for the credit/money that was being used to pay for them.

The whole thing is an utter mess which someone really should have been regulating better but too many people were coming out with too many big sacks of money from more than just the speculators offices and too many politicians made their reputations (looking at you Gordon Brown) for the "financial success" and "Overseeing The Golden of Banking" over the last few years to want to stop the merry-go-round.

Speculators were simply doing their jobs, as were the oil companies. It's their jobs to make as much money as they can for both themselves and their shareholders. If someone puts $4/gallon on the gas/petrol pump and then lots of people roll up and keep on filing up their cars/vans/trucks etc with it, then why not keep pushing up the prices? The same goes for house prices too. Or should everyone who made a bundle on selling their home recently be made to pay too?

The regulatory bodies and politicians who were all to happy to stand idly by as the credit funded financial boom grew and grew without ever asking the question "How can people afford these expensive houses/gas prices?" and do something about it before it all went so predictably and horribly wrong are the people whom we should probably be looking at if blame is to be shared around.